I am not normally someone who feels prompted or compelled to speak on something, but I have this nagging need to share my thoughts and feelings on food storage and emergency preparedness in detail.
In case you don't know, my church counsels us to be prepared for potential small term emergencies or challenges that face our families. Contrary to popular opinion, it's not a Doomsday Prepper sort of thing, but rather, they encourage us to have provisions on hand for the smaller crises that do happen in life. Power outages happen. Natural disasters do happen. People are laid off from jobs. Prices go up. We get snowed in. Stuff happens. And that is what we are admonished to prepare for, not for the end of the world, so to speak.
When I was a kid, when I heard the term "food storage" (for example), I cringed. I had this vision of women sitting around at a church meeting discussing the 230,000,000 things you can do with 800 year old wheat. We were advised to store a year's worth of food, and my small mind saw a house with #10 cans flowing out of the windows. I was JUST. NOT. INTERESTED.
And I carried that view with me into my marriage. When I was married and was a new mom, I was kinda interested in food storage and emergency preparedness, but didn't really know where to begin. To me, it was a lot like setting up a house when you're newly married--you know you need a lot of stuff, but you'll never have it all at once, so you become overwhelmed. Everyone tells you to do things a little bit at a time, but you think, "Oh, it'll never get accomplished that way." But, someday, you have a decent supply of goods in your house, enough to live and enjoy life, and you look back on those early days with nostalgia and a lesson learned.
That is what happened with me and food storage and emergency preparedness. Upon the birth of our second child, I started to really feel inspired to make it a priority for our family. And since then (maybe even a little before that), we have been buying a little here and a little there. I want to work up to a year's worth of food, and a decent supply of emergency supplies (a full week's worth, even two, would be such an accomplishment, down to alternative heating, etc.) We're not there yet, but we're getting there. Much like a lot we do in our lives, be it setting up a home, or paying down debt, or teaching children, it's a step at a time. I have been so pleased at how much progress "a little at a time" has made when it comes to our goals.
I was talking with a friend who is older and is very much into food storage, and she was talking to me about how surprised she was that, being "young," I was so into the concept of it and emergency preparedness, particularly since she had noticed that my generation doesn't seem to be as into it, that she knows people my age who buy nothing for the future, even members of my church, and who pass up opportunities to buy a bit here, and a bit there. On the one hand, it really made me sad to realize that a lot of young parents like us aren't doing it, but on the other hand, I totally get it. It is such a completely overwhelming idea. It really is. When I first started, I remember calling my mother in law panicked over all of this stuff I felt I needed to do RIGHT THIS SECOND. I still get that feeling sometimes.
I'm sharing this with you because I hope to inspire you to squirrel away a little food, to make an evacuation plan in case of fire, to update your smoke detectors (we NEED to do this...the ones we have up work, but we took a couple down and never put them back up), to prepare 72 hour kits--do SOMETHING. It's not as difficult as you think, and even a little can go a long way.
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